15: Summary - How to Measure Your Smart Tribe ROI
The author indicates this final chapter will "sum it all up." (EN: To me, this means that she will repeat some of her key points and there won't be much in the way of new information, so there may not be many notes.)
She repeats the five key "accelerators" - focus, clarity, accountability, influence, and sustainability. These are critical in getting people out of the animal state of fight/flight/freeze in reaction to threats and apply their rational mind to proactive thinking in pursuit of opportunities.
As a start, you should perform a rigorous and objective assessment of your as-is state, which is going to take time and the results are going to be difficult to accept. Then, consider your desired to-be state, noting the differences from as-is characteristics and laying plans to move the company from one to the other.
Much of what you do will consist of motivating others - you cannot make this journey alone buy must lead others in the right direction.
Common Problems
She means to provide a number of "real world" scenarios that could constitute obstacles, and suggest ways to overcome them.
- Being overwhelmed by the scope of the changes.
- People who resist delegation.
- Layoffs and terminations.
- Addressing problematic performance.
- Motivating people to take on more.
- Communicating consequences.
- Change messaging.
- Rallying the troops.
- Marketing issues.
- Unhappy clients.
- Low innovation and enthusiasm.
(EN: Her "ways to overcome them" consists of references to previous chapters and toolkits.)
Case Study: Meeting to Death
(EN: Yet another contrived and idiosyncratic story - I'm annotating key points only.)
- Too many meetings are a sign of cultural dysfunction. Her example includes an executive who had been in 20 hours of meetings in two days. No-one can get anything done, and the point of the meetings is often politics - justifying what you are doing or plan to do, and not actually doing it.
- More communication is not a panacea. Effective communication, however, is useful - but effective communication does not take that much time when the messages are focused and crafted.
- By sharing information via email rather than communicating basic facts verbally, over half of meetings can be eliminated and the rest can be made up to 75% shorter. (EN: I've tried this, and it doesn't always work because people don't bother to read the emails because they expected I'd tell them the same thing verbally in the meeting - and because no-one had done their homework, I had to do so. It likely takes a much firmer push from management, including communication skills training, to get people to change their habits.)
- The benefits of reducing meetings are substantial: using email to eliminate a two-hour weekly status meeting among 20 people frees up 2,000 working hours per year (a full-time employee). Any meeting that can be reduced or eliminated has a similar multiplicative effect on performance: minutes saved times number of people.
- When a person displays obstructive or defensive behavior, recognize that they are in their animal state and are seeking safety, belonging, or mattering. Address this need quickly to get them out of the animal state and into higher-minded thinking. (EN: A particular issue is when you attempt to ignore their concerns rather than addressing them - they don't go away until they have been specifically and overtly addressed.)
Coaching
While a manager runs a department, a department is made up of individual people. And unless he interacts with people as individuals, he cannot be effective in achieving results. One-on-one conversations with a few key people are often far more effective than a department meeting in resolving issues.
Here's her suggested process for coaching:
- Determine the outcome I'd like by asking: what would you like? What would that do for you? When will you know when you have it?
- Do the "three chair exercise" from chapter four and consider the other person's meta-programs in the context of the problem.
- Craft a message from the other person's perspective, not your own
- Seek out influencing phrases that will resound with them, given their state of mind.
- Book a 30- to 60-minute meeting with the person, individually, in a place where you will have privacy
- Work together to find a solution, realizing that it's not a matter of telling the other person what they ought to do while you do nothing. You must partner with them to provide the support they need.
More Metrics for Success
The ROI of a smart tribe program is its principle indicator of success, as nothing speaks to an organization as convincingly as the financial results it will achieve by following a course of action. But there are other metrics that can be used to gauge your success.
(EN: She refers to a list of metrics in the appendix, but the appendix is not included in the audiobook. Her discussion strays across a number of things that suggest metrics, such as changes in employee behaviors, but her description not quite clear enough to document.)
Assess, Envision, Plan, Act, and Measure
The basic stages for her program are to assess the present situation, envision the desired future state, plan the tasks to get from one another, implement the plan, and measure success.
She stresses "positive target fixation" - rather than focusing on the problems you might encounter, focus on the success you wish to achieve. Focusing on the problems keeps you in a fearful state, defensive rather than proactive. If you focus on problems, you will notice all the things that stand in your way and make defeat a self-fulfilling process. If you focus on success, you will be constantly rewarded by feedback that reinforces the sense you're headed in the right direction.